The evolution of modern communications has resulted in most users having multiple telephony devices. These telephony devices include traditional office, home, and mobile telephones, as well as personal computing devices such as personal computers and personal digital assistants, which afford telephony capabilities. These telephony devices may establish communications over one or more circuit-switched, packet-based, or wireless communication networks.
Depending on the relative location of a user, the user will have a preferred telephony device for receiving incoming calls. For example, the user may prefer using her work telephone instead of her mobile telephone while she is in the office. Further, if multiple telephony devices are available to the user in the user's office, the user may prefer one office telephony device over another. Unfortunately, the telephony device receiving a call is generally selected by the caller, and not by the user receiving the call.
Although telephony systems generally support call forwarding, most users do not take the time to configure their respective telephony devices for call forwarding, unless call forwarding is going to be in place for a significant period of time. Continuous configuring of call forwarding mechanisms for multiple devices is both time consuming and cumbersome. Further, it is easy to forget to remove call forwarding configurations when locations or circumstances change.
Since users generally have a preference as to the telephony device at which calls should be received based on the user's location, there is a need to automatically route incoming calls to the telephony device preferred by the user based on the user's location. There is a further need to provide such routing in an automated fashion without requiring significant or continuous manual input by the user.